


From the Jade Cage

by speckledsolanaceae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Fantasy, M/M, Magic, Oneshot, Shapeshifting, Trafficking, Warlocks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 10:48:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20965301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae
Summary: In the corner of the room, there was a cage of jade where a great hawk clung to the bars, not small enough for the green. Its plumage fumed with fear, every heave of breath rippling through its feathers like the flash of sequins losing their luster. Its eye gazed wide through the square gaps, pressed against the bars and screaming silently against its muzzle. If its wings could beat, they would.





	From the Jade Cage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PrittlePrince](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrittlePrince/gifts).

_The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted,  
_ _rode the wind. Its eye at this distance looked _  
_like green glass; its feet were the color_  
_ of butter. Speed obviously, was joy. But_  
_ then, so was the sudden, slow circle it carved_  
_ into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring_  
_ of its shoulders, and the pulling into_  
_ itself the long, sharp-edge wings, and the_  
_ fall into the grass where it tussled a moment,_  
_ like a bundle of brown leaves, and then, again,_  
_ lifted itself into the air, that butter-color_  
_ clenched in order to hold a small a small, still_  
_ body, and it flew off as my mind sang out oh_  
_ all that loose, blue rink of sky, where does_  
_ it go to, and why?_

\- Mary Oliver

In the corner of the room, there was a cage of jade where a great hawk clung to the bars, not small enough for the green. Its plumage fumed with fear, every heave of breath rippling through its feathers like the flash of sequins losing their luster. Its eye gazed wide through the square gaps, pressed against the bars and screaming silently against its muzzle. If its wings could beat, they would.

Jungwoo sat in a different corner, palms pressed to the cover of his book—the one that never ended—its edges digging into his thighs, and stared at this massive bird made so small.

He was too afraid to ask the shop wizard why they kept a bird in a cage. He’d seen them keep other things in cages like articulated slugs and periwinkle ash, but never something so big and so intelligent.

The air was foggy with incense, the particles magnetized toward sun mites floating in through the colored glass high, high up in the shop’s rafters. With all the creek flowers spilling from gaps, the songbirds and captured leaves, bracken swallowing up footsteps, the shop was deceptively bright. It was to balance the bleak because there was no other way to do it. Black and white and grey couldn’t exist without color. They would simply form a new contrast, shattering into pieces as each Good was ripped away until there was nothing left.

The brightest, most vivid places had the most grey.

“An ugly little thing, aren’t you?” said the wizard, whose kin Jungwoo had never liked.

“Yes, sir,” Jungwoo said, because his retainer was in the back room doing _ something _and would not protect him. Hardly did even when they were present. The grey was too strong in the shop for his retainer to be doing anything good, but he was chained to them, and so he would sit and tolerate an arrogant wizard.

Wizards didn’t often like humans, and Jungwoo was very human. So human that Imagination came very easily and he was named as somewhat bizarre. Wizardry was all strict and all utility with little room for wonder. Humans and wizards either complemented each other well or ripped each others’ limbs off for sacrifice.

This wizard was very wizard, which is just how some people were born. 

And Jungwoo was very human, and some people were born like that, too.

So Jungwoo looked little and ugly to the wizard of the shop, but if _ he _ was little and ugly, the wizard was a decaying woodlice, so Jungwoo wasn’t insulted. Life was very subjective.

“You’re staring at the bird,” said the wizard with his whiskers curling into the corners of his mouth. He said it like a reprimand.

“Is it a bird if it’s not flying, sir?”

And perhaps that was too cheeky of him, because the crack of the shop wizard slapping him rippled through the room and against the bookshelves. And perhaps that was silly of the wizard, because the pain warmed Jungwoo’s Imagination. He was bad at Manifestation, but very good at Conversion, and the wizard looked very, very annoyed as Jungwoo stared up at him, now, and wondered how different the wizard would be if he had wings.

“Don’t look at it. You’ll make it angry,” the wizard hissed.

But Jungwoo didn’t think that was true. The hawk couldn’t be any more angry than it already was. He held his tongue and opened his tome instead. He could watch the new words from the still raw Conversion spill across a fresh page. 

Imagination was a strange ability because no other Talents had such little consistency. _ Every _human was different in the ways they Converted and Manifested. Jungwoo couldn’t Manifest on his own, so he used a medium tailored to his particular strain of Conversion. The words that appeared in his book allowed him to actually make his ability useful. Significantly less destructive on top of that. There was nothing like a very human child unable to harness their Imagination. 

It came to no one’s surprise that Jungwoo didn’t have parents.

Hence the retainer. Everyone needed one or the other—a guardian or a retainer up until the age of seventeen, and Jungwoo was less than that.

In any case, Jungwoo had been piecing together a new spell for weeks. It was getting into 5 pages, but would be more if his medium’s script weren’t so small. (“Why is it so cramped?” Jungwoo had asked his retainer, once, and they had replied, “Maybe it’s anxious.”) Jungwoo wasn’t a druid. He was bad at meditating. (“Well, that’s a stereotype. Not all druids meditate,” his retainer had corrected him.)

Jungwoo bit his lip looking at the page fill, his cheek still stinging. Some humans needed mediums for Conversion, and others for Manifestation, and very rarely there was a human who could do both just fine on their own. Jungwoo could Convert just about any physical stimulus into Imagination, and his book then pulled that Imagination from him and turned it into the words he wished he knew how to write.

The wizard creaked away against the floorboards, calling over his shoulder, “No funny human business, boy.”

Oh, and how Jungwoo hated doing what he was told.

With one flicking look toward the jade cage, Jungwoo flattened his palm against the current page of his book. The scrawl stuttered, and he watched a little question mark pop up from his medium. He flipped to a fresh page six or so leaves away, tapped that page to signal his desire for a new spell, then closed his book.

With another glance at the big hawk eye narrowing in on him, he slid off the stool he had been sitting on and placed his hand on the wood seat. With a deep breath, he held his closed book up and slammed the binding down on his knuckles. Pain fizzled through his hand, sparking with angry tingles, but he hit his fingers again for good measure, squeezing his eyes closed for the pain.

It wasn’t just pain he could convert, but it was the simplest form—the easiest sometimes. Easier than untangling his Imagination without an outside stimulus and force it into going from a happy plod to a sprint. He needed stimulus _ now _.

A memory of when he was four burst into his mind like a fern from between concrete slabs. His hand had been broken and he’d been sobbing into the ground with dirt muddying his mouth and lips. Jungwoo clutched the memory and let it grow into something else. What if he’d been taught earlier than four how to channel his Imagination? What if it had started to rain and flowers bloomed? What if his mother had been there? Would she look like him? Or did he look more like his dad?

Hand throbbing and eyes blinking away tears, he reopened his book to the new page and crept his way over to the hawk. His medium was Manifesting so fast he wouldn’t have been able to read the chicken scratch if he weren’t so practiced.

Jungwoo glanced toward the back door where the wizard left through, took another deep breath, and began to Cast.

Manifested Imagination took a lot of different forms—for some it was prose, or poetry, or dance, or paintings, or speeches, but for Jungwoo, it was lyrics. He sang under his breath, was hardly even processing the lines of text and bars of notes before the cage began to creak. The hawk jerked, sizing Jungwoo up carefully with its other eye, scrutinizing so hard Jungwoo felt it might burn through him.

The cage _ groaned _, and the hawk rustled, and Jungwoo heard the door to the back room open.

He’d never sung so fast and jumbled, but it still came out like a burst copper faucet.

In the same moment that he felt a hard hand on his shoulder, the jade prison shattered like someone had dropped it from a six-story building. In a massive, spreading canopy of feathers, the hawk burst from its confines, its butter yellow claws coming up to scrape away its muzzle in a bone-rattling screech. All the brown of its body flashed ebony, blazing with an anger Jungwoo could feel sweeping over and through him, and he turned to see the wizard stagger back, mouth gaping. In desperation, the wizard threw one of his books at the bird, its pages opening up and flashing blue in a shield. 

The hawk reeled, but not by much, and Jungwoo stood trying to process just how gargantuan this creature was, its wingtips brushing the wall to bookshelf, and there was no possible way it could have fit in something so tiny. Its feathers flashed between brown and something almost gold, its shriek resonating with the entire room like the building was simply a tuning fork for its outrage.

Jungwoo connected all the dots at the very same second there was a fissure of forest green splitting the hawk apart like space itself had spontaneously decided to rupture. The bird crumpled and folded into the light, and if the man that stepped out of the hawk form wasn’t the largest goddamn warlock Jungwoo had ever seen—

Almost anyone could have an animal form if they had an inclination toward it, but Jungwoo had never quite figured it out. He couldn’t match wavelengths with concrete things. Only broad, abstract things that bloomed into daydreams.

But the terrifying thing was that warlocks—and this figure could be nothing but—drew their power from Emotion, and this warlock bled wrath.

For a breathtaking moment, the world exploded around Jungwoo, papers, plants, glass, wood ripping itself to shreds and shattering in a detonation of detritus, and the raw ferocity of the warlock’s outrage was so rich and blinding that for that single moment, Jungwoo imagined he could taste pain.

When the dust settled, he felt warmth, and he was being lifted.

He hadn’t been lifted since he was five.

And he knew it wasn’t his retainer lifting him, because his retainer smelled like burning greens, and this figure smelled like agony. Underneath that was petrichor and living grass.

He wasn’t going to protest. He pressed his face into the warmth of this strange warlock’s neck and let himself be carried, his medium pressed between them.

If he opened his eyes, he’d see the shop utterly collapsed in on itself like a wooden tower with its basic blocks yanked out from beneath it.

There wasn’t a single scratch on Jungwoo, though.

The warlock carried him for a long time, but not so long that Jungwoo would be afraid of being dropped. Instead, he was let down gently, and he could look at who he freed properly.

Young.

The warlock was young.

“Oh,” Jungwoo said, because the warlock couldn’t be much more than a handful of years older than him, and there was pain and anger and relief in otherwise kind eyes.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know trafficking was a thing. Powerful beings with strong traits were an invaluable commodity and resource if you knew how to make them yours, but the best way was through forming trust.

He supposed, though, that if you were ever going to capture and torture any being, a warlock would be the one to do it with.

The warlock said nothing, but reached to remove a shred of paper from Jungwoo’s hair. He had large palms and a delicate touch.

“Do you speak?” asked Jungwoo, and god—it was just a hint of a smile from this being, but it was kind of stunning.

“Yeah.” The other’s voice was like rust, creaking and rough and bleeding, and Jungwoo felt like that answered the question he never intended to ask: exactly how long had he been captive?

“What’s your name?”

The warlock hesitated. He wore a long, black jacket that made him look taller and bigger than any person ought to be, but there was a gauntness and kindness in his body that diminished the intimidation significantly. 

Names were powerful in the right hands and useless in the wrong ones—a charm as old as time existed where people that mattered could summon their loved ones with just a chirp of their title if they truly, truly needed them. An enemy could invoke a name and nothing (absolutely nothing) would happen at all, except maybe the owner of the title would get an itchy nose.

“Johnny,” said the warlock, and Jungwoo thought he knew why the warlock hesitated at all.

“Jungwoo,” Jungwoo said in turn (it was only fair).

They were far from the shop, embedded in a space of woods bright with the midday sun and wild with plantlife. From the corner of his eye, Jungwoo could see a rabbit chewing on something and staring at them with its silly, empty-looking eyes.

“Is your hand okay?” Johnny asked, and his voice was painful to hear, but this time, he spoke without prompting.

Jungwoo blinked, almost failing to recall that he had beat up his hand to free Johnny’s animal form, and laughed. “Sure. I had to act fast.”

“Thank you.”

Jungwoo didn’t expect the tears. He did _ not _ expect a whole warlock to crumple into his arms and cry the most silent tears he’d ever witnessed. That being said, he hadn’t expected to save an entire living being from the traffic system, either. He wondered distantly if his retainer was dead.

He tried not to think about it.

“Oh, it’s okay. It’s no problem. I’d do it again.”

“What kind of human has a familiar?”

Jungwoo looked down, surprised, and took in the mouthy tot having a staring contest with his sharp-shinned hawk—its smallest form. He recognized the kid as the innkeeper’s son, front teeth knocked out like someone had rapped their knuckles on the wrong door. The hawk was perched on the back of his chair, talons pinching the wood.

“Oh, he’s not a familiar.” Jungwoo took a bite of the stew, chewing at the over-cooked meat he spooned up. Good flavor, though.

“A pet, then?”

Jungwoo almost snorted his stew right up his nose.

“No. He’s my friend. He’s having a bad day.”

The kid’s eyes widened, gaze darting away from Johnny’s, and bowed a little stiffly. “Sorry sir—ma’am—I—”

“Sir,” Jungwoo laughed. “Kinda hard to tell with birds, huh?”

The kid nodded and then _ fled _, and Jungwoo could hardly hold in his laughter.

Johnny nibbled at Jungwoo’s ear with his beak.

Over the years, Johnny billowed more petrichor and living grass than hurt and anger. He was mellow and sweet as he hooked his chin over Jungwoo’s shoulder.

“What’s your spell this time?”

Jungwoo considered the pages he had open and shrugged the shoulder Johnny wasn’t occupying. “It’s starting to look like some chimera of a—a blueberry cloning spell?”

Johnny’s laugh was deep and sweet in his ear and he kissed there, lips soft. “I wouldn’t mind more blueberries in the world.” Jungwoo stretched out his back, eyes drifting closed, and twisted to press his lips to Johnny’s cheek as a returned favor. The light through his nook’s window was low and warm, spreading a blush across the leaves of his succulents.

“Is there a reason you interrupted my oh-so-important Manifesting?” Jungwoo asked, reaching to hold Johnny there against his shoulder where he belonged.

“Mhm.” There was a somber lilt to Johnny’s response, and that was enough for Jungwoo to open his eyes again. “Got a report.”

Jungwoo’s stomach flipped, but his heart picked up a pace of something like hope. “Please tell me it’s not a warlock.”

Nuzzling into him, Johnny hummed to decline, his voice vibrating against the fragile skin hiding his heartbeat. “The report said sorcerer. We’ve got two hours, but it’s close.”

A burst of insult swelled in Jungwoo’s beating chest. “It’s _ close _?”

Johnny laughed and nipped another kiss into his skin. “Think of it as convenient rather than an indignity.”

Pouting, Jungwoo snapped his medium closed, fingertips grazing the runes and etchings in its cover. They’d worked hard to clear their region of any traffic, and _ yet _. “Alright well, fine. Let’s get moving, then.”

As soon as he stood, Johnny captured his hips between his hands and angled to kiss the pout off his mouth. “You look precious today.”

Jungwoo gave Johnny a dry look. He hadn’t washed his hair in days and he had an undersized, raggy shirt on that was a sad excuse for a crop-top. “Why are you flirting with me before an interception?”

Johnny kissed his nose, then his forehead. “Because I’ll be angry when we get there and I want to be happy, now.” As if to prove it, the touch of his fingertips against Jungwoo’s exposed waist fizzled sweetly.

With exaggerated exasperation, Jungwoo tilted his head back and sighed before smiling and tip-toeing to reach Johnny’s forehead. He left a kiss there and then nudged him out of the way. “Let’s go.”

“We have two hours,” Johnny said, and even without looking, Jungwoo could almost see his own special Johnny-pout. He knew what _ that _meant. “And it’s close!”

Jungwoo ran his fingers through his greasy hair, laughed, and turned back to face his partner. “How close?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Liar.”

“Thirty.”

“There we go.” Jungwoo smiled, and Johnny had a silly, overwhelming amount of fondness in his expression. Some parts of Jungwoo used to wonder if it was because he was the one who saved him, or if Johnny had learned to love him for simply… being him. Strange, can’t-sleep-at-night-for-wondering-if-feathers-itched, blueberry cloner, punches a wall to get a new idea Him. 

He sighed, and smiled bigger, and let Johnny distract him for an hour—but no more than that.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday to Casey!!! I'm on restricted wifi, so I can't link her, but you can find her at @prittleceebs on Twitter if you would like! Her ao3 is also linked above, since this is gifted to her. She's an incredible writer ♡ 
> 
> I'll be honest—I'm a little insecure over how this turned out. I had a lot of lore and worldbuilding to fit in a single oneshot, and I had to make sure everything made enough sense while still pacing things enough for it to not bog down. So this was a challenge for me, but I really love this small universe I made.
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
[curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   



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